Major Barbara

George Bernard Shaw was aware that he never got the ending of Major Barbara right. The great Irish dramatist described as “terrible” the final scene of his 1905 comedy-drama in which a zealous Salvation Army lass from Mayfair becomes acquainted with her munitions-manufacturing father, who may be the world’s most powerful man. “I don’t think anyone could do anything with it,” Shaw despaired.

“Terrible” is an exaggeration; the scene is full of provocative speeches that crackle, pop, and snap with distinctively Shavian turns of phrase; and the stage is filled with characters whose development is marvelous to behold, if sometimes perplexing. But Major Barbara is famously difficult to pull off and can be remarkably tedious in the wrong hands. The latter half of Shaw’s Act III–or Act II, Scene Two in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s current revival, which is performed with a single intermission–is problematic for performers and audiences alike. The play shifts from light drawing-room fare in Act I to grim naturalism in Act II. Then, in an Act III that’s hard to categorize, it returns to a fantastical form of comedy that’s designed to close the play with uplift but, ultimately, is unconvincing. Given these structural flaws, the Roundabout’s choice of Major Barbara as its summer offering seemed misguided, to say the least.

It’s easy to guess why the Roundabout scheduled Major Barbara this summer: Cherry Jones was available to take the demanding lead and Daniel Sullivan was willing to direct. Jones, who became a star in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of The Heiress, was last seen on Broadway–miscast, but acquitting herself honorably–in Sullivan’s revival of O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten. Sullivan received a Tony Award for directing the 2001 Pulitzer Prize play Proof. In the Roundabout’s Major Barbara, Jones heads a cast that looks like the top-tier of the client list at ICM or the William Morris Agency.

When the curtain rises at the American Airlines Theatre, the audience beholds Dana Ivey garbed in an Edwardian lace creation that’s puffy and pompous and unquestionably the design of that peerless pro Jane Greenwood. Ivey is surrounded by a sumptuous setting dreamed up by the great John Lee Beatty and beautifully lit by Brian MacDevitt. What can the audience do but break into reflexive applause? As that applause subsides, the playgoers are counting the glittering names: Sullivan, Ivey (a true empress of Broadway), Beatty, Greenwood. And there are more big-shots to come: Jones, of course, as the eponymous Barbara; David Warner as Shaw’s hero, Andrew Undershaft; and David Lansbury as Bill Walker, who personifies the brutality of poverty.

For a few minutes, Ms. Ivey, as the acid-tongued dragon Lady Britomart lords it over Zak Orth, who plays her son, Stephen Undershaft. The audience delights in her reliable impersonation of an aristocratic bulldozer. The jokes hit their marks. The stage picture, courtesy of Beatty and Greenwood, is eye-popping. This evening of star turns is going to be easy to take. Then the stage begins filling up with Jones, Henny Russell as her sister, Rick Holmes as Russell’s twit of a fiancé, Denis O’Hare as Jones’ beau, and Warner as paterfamilias to Shaw’s utterly dysfunctional Undershafts. And things take an unexpected turn. The impression that the Roundabout’s Major Barbarais merely a summer vehicle for a bunch of stars fades or, more accurately, evaporates. What’s going on here? These people aren’t stars; they’re a cohesive ensemble creating an array of complex characters, making the music of Shaw’s dialogue ring out through the exquisite, commodious theater.

There are weak points: James Gale as Snobby Price swallows some of his lines. Lansbury’s scenes have a stop-and-go quality, though his interpretation of the raging, down-and-out Walker (one of the souls Barbara tries to save) is intriguing. Almost inevitably, the company is somewhat at sea when faced with the play’s conclusion. The final moments, in which Barbara and Adolphus Cusins (played with verve by O’Hare) are recruited into the armaments business by the devilishly clever Undershaft–ostensibly to solve the world’s problems–are as unconvincing as ever. But the scene is played with as much conviction as any cast could muster. Sullivan’s actors are so accomplished, their performances so consistently intricate and interesting, that this Major Barbara earns special honors among recent Shaw productions in New York.

Shaw’s wit and vituperation in Major Barbara remain relevant to a world in which nations coexist uneasily, governments amass armaments, and a sizeable proportion of the population lives in poverty. Sullivan’s interpretation offers no revelations, but the actors are so competent at handling the spicy Shavian prose that the dialogue feels urgent and up-to-date. The action moves swiftly and nimbly so that the radical shifts in mood among the play’s four scenes and the implausible aspects of the characters’ psychological development are minimally disconcerting.

As the munitions-maker’s daughter, Jones conveys religious fervor with sympathy and without caricature. Her disillusionment in the play’s second half is carefully calibrated and thoroughly convincing. “I stood on the rock I thought eternal,” says Barbara, “and without a word of warning it reeled and crumbled under me.” Jones and Warner, who has the play’s juiciest role, are well matched and play skillfully off each other. “If your old religion broke down yesterday,” Undershaft goads her, “get a newer and better one for tomorrow.” Shaw practically invites the actor playing Undershaft to upstage his colleagues, but Warner resists the impulse. In the final scene, he even takes his performance down a notch to give leeway to Jones and O’Hare as they pull out all the stops, raising their joint conversion–they’re joining the Undershaft armaments business–to the level of exaltation. The two make their characters’ development captivating, if not wholly understandable, to the audience.

It’s almost too good to be true: sitting in a beautifully renovated theater, seeing Shaw performed by worthy interpreters, is not what one expects on Broadway in this millennium. If only the playwright himself were on hand to see what Sullivan and his dream cast do with that final bit he thought so “terrible.” One can’t help imagining the old, bearded Irishman peering down from the dome of the American Airlines Theatre, just as Al Hirschfeld caricatured him on the record album of My Fair Lady. He might be reflecting on a possible rewrite, but he’d be smiling.